A slippery slope

We live in a strange world now, one that promotes mediocre books, movies, music and art as very good or even excellent. The reviews are often stellar; I know because I read them. I'm always interested in what others mean or have to say. I will often watch a film or read a book because it's gotten good reviews, but it happens more often than not these days that I disagree with the reviewers, professional and non-professional. That was the case with the Oscar-winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once (I don't understand how this film won so many Oscars) and with some recent best-selling books (The Midnight Library, Euphoria, and Normal People come to mind). All of them received stellar reviews, but I was disappointed by them. My criteria for judging them to be less than stellar are the following: poor plotting, disjointed plots, disguised preachiness, banal fluff that passes for philosophical thought, lack of depth concerning the serious matters that are taken up in the film or books, and so on. That being said, there were some classic books I read when I was growing up that I didn't like or didn't make me feel good, but objectively I know that they were good books. I have read books considered to be classics, by authors who are considered to be excellent that I haven't liked--for example, some few books by Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. I evaluate them as mediocre because they had poor plots or rather ridiculous or superficial plotting and a failure to create engaging characters--mediocre at best. Most writers would probably agree that not everything they've published is up to snuff. How could it be? My point is that we need to be able to discuss some of these aspects when reading and writing reviews, because otherwise we can just accept that reviews have become sycophantic. Real objective discussion is rare at present. It seems as though the criteria for judging something as excellent or not have been pushed aside in favor of how one feels about the book, movie, art or politician in question. In other words, using subjective criteria for evaluations rather than objective criteria. If one likes a book, movie, piece of art, or politician because it/he or she made you feel good, I have no problem with that, but it can't end there. There have to be logical objective reasons as well for why one thinks something is excellent. But that's the slippery slope we're heading down right now. The definition of a slippery slope is a dangerous pathway or route to follow; a route that leads to trouble (Slippery slope - Idioms by The Free Dictionary). On that slippery slope, feelings alone matter, not logic or common sense. Feelings determine nearly everything, and it's easy to get fooled into thinking that something is good merely because other people feel that it is good. But it isn't. 

Nowadays we read about a classic book or film being 'cancelled' because it contained some off-color language or outmoded ideas that the woke crowd found insulting and wanted to rid the world of. One simply cannot do this. I am not in favor of cancelling books, films and pieces of art simply because they are outdated or not relevant to current societal mores and ways of doing things. One can teach students about those novels or films in reference to the age in which they were written or made, in other words, place them in their proper historical context. But we cannot rid the world of everything we don't like or pretend that it doesn't exist. We cannot cancel everything we don't like merely based on feelings. 

The potential for harmful situations exists when we abandon logic in favor of feelings alone. Basing judgments solely on feelings leads to a mob mentality, and mob mentalities never lead to anything good. In political situations, we've seen what can happen when mobs get out of control--the January 6th Capitol attack, for example. Even if it didn't start out as a planned attack, it became an attack and got out of control, no matter what Tucker Carlson says and feels. Again, Carslon knows (feels) that it was basically a sightseeing tour. He's concluded for us all and we should just accept his word. Except that I don't. His evaluation is not based on facts, but on feelings, his feelings. It's also based on his network's greed; how much they can milk this situation for all it's worth. 

The road out

I’m often asked how I dealt with leaving my birth country for this one, especially since I did so as a young adult and not as a child. I answer—it was difficult to do so, but my situation was quite different than for many other foreigners here. I was not an immigrant or political refugee looking for a new life in a better place or an opportunist seeking materialistic gains. My decision to move was made carefully, but it was made in order to give a personal relationship that was still a seed, a chance to grow. I knew that if I did not give it that chance, that I would regret not doing so down the line. At the time I chose to move to Norway, my life was ready for change—both professionally and personally. There were a number of factors that came together in a type of synergy at that time, that made moving here the right thing to do. And over twenty years later, I can say that I don’t regret having moved from the USA to Norway since that budding relationship and my life generally changed in ways that have been mostly positive, challenging, and rewarding. But the past twenty years have not been a bed of roses either. Nothing good is ever achieved without struggle and frustration; that I’ve learned. I’ve also learned that nothing is ever handed to you in this life. At least that has not been the case for my life. It has rarely, if ever, happened that any road I’ve chosen has been an easy one initially. We all choose our respective paths to follow. Mine happen to be strewn with other types of challenges than if I had chosen to remain for the rest of my life in the town of my birth. If I had done that, I am sure that I would have faced other types of challenges. But that is not my life story. I had no idea when I was starting out in the work world that I would end up working and living in Europe.

The difficulties any foreigner faces when in a new country have mostly to do with learning the language and trying to understand the new culture that you find yourself in. Scandinavian culture is not very unlike American culture in the sense that we enjoy the same things—a materialistic way of life that does not lack for most things—food, clothing, shelter, vacations, cars, and luxury items, political freedom, family interest (focus on the nuclear family mostly), a mostly secular lifestyle, interest in books, movies, and other media, and many other things. It does not feel foreign to live here as it might have felt had I moved to a poor backward country or one that was a police state or totalitarian regime. When I go out to the malls here to shop, I could be anywhere in America at a big shopping mall. The only difference is the language spoken. So yes, that is a difficulty and it takes several years to learn to speak a new language. For some it may go faster; for me it did not. It is the subtleties in any culture—the unspoken codes of conduct at work and even in social situations, that also make living in a new country difficult. Some of those codes are impossible to crack, or if cracked, impossible to understand. I have given up trying to understand some of them here; I used about ten years doing so and after that I folded. I don’t think like a Scandinavian from the start point. I would have had to have been born here for that to have happened. So I believe in myself, in who I am as an American, am proud of my heritage and my roots, and have truly reclaimed my identity as an American living in a foreign country, despite all the problems in America, the crazy politics and politicians, the contradictions, the inequalities, the disparity between rich and poor, all those things. Scandinavian societies do not have such disparity between the rich and the poor, but there are other problems associated with most people having more or less the same standard of living. It might sound utopian to those who do not live here; it is not. It leads to an odd kind of social conformity, one that I am not particularly comfortable with. It also leads to a kind of complacency that is the result of knowing that the government will take care of most of your needs.

The biggest difficulty for me in living abroad is not being able to see my family and friends in the USA as much as I’d like. And even though I know that I wouldn’t see them all that often if I lived in New York now, it would be easier to do so because the physical distance between us would not be large. It is the possibility of doing so that I miss, perhaps the spontaneity associated with socializing. My annual visit to New York each year is a well-planned event; I start preparing for it many months ahead of time. I hope to spend more time in my country again when I retire; retirement is still years away, but it is not too soon to plan for it. And I am doing that, slowly but surely, so that it will be possible to visit with friends and family for longer times.